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Culture / History

Chicago Architecture Data

A New Archive of Chicago Buildings Goes Beyond the Loop – the new digital archive Chicago Architecture Data is the work of software developer and architectural photographer / writer John Morris and team.  They’ve drawn on information from the 1995 Chicago Historical Resources Survey, city and county tax records and assessor’s data, the blog …

Steedman Architectural Collection in SLPL

Steedman murals in the Great Hall – visitors to the main St. Louis Public Library (SLPL) in downtown St. Louis, MO will have the unusual opportunity to see books from the Steedman Architectural Collection on display through May of this year.  The exhibit is in the library’s Great Hall – itself worth …

H. Lee Waters’ Movies of Local People

H. Lee Waters Film Collection at Duke University Libraries – from 1936 to 1942 North Carolina photographer H. Lee Waters made hundreds of captivating short silent films of local people. During the Depression, when many couldn’t spare hard-won wages for a portrait but did allow themselves the luxury of going to the movies, …

Future cities and context

  Future Cities – 44-min discussion on BBC’s The Forum about new cities in the coming decades, especially in developing countries, and what features would make them more livable and vibrant for the largest number of people. If you’re involved in the design of cities, if you live in a growing city, …

1939 vision of the future

      The World of Tomorrow in 1939 – post on Design Observer about the 1939 New York World’s Fair, a dazzling display of optimism and innovation 75 years ago with the theme ‘Building the World of Tomorrow’. For a nation just coming out of the Great Depression and …

Year of Le Notre

  A year to celebrate Le Notre – 2013 marks 400 years since the birth of Andre Le Notre, the French landscaper who created the gardens of Versailles and whose influence on urban planners and landscape architects continues to this day.  In his honor, the Palace of Versailles has organized …

Why our future depends on libraries, reading, and daydreaming

Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming – an impassioned and thought-provoking argument for the value to society of reading, libraries, librarians, and how the daydreaming that reading can stimulate leads to imagining a better future and the innovation that our social and economic well-being depends …

Two on China: Connected China app / China’s Urban Billions series

  Connected China: Explaining the Players and Networks within China – post on the always-interesting blog information aesthetics about a “beautifully crafted” app developed collaboratively by Thomson Reuters and Fathom Information Design.  Here’s a direct link to the Connected China app.   [It] tracks and visualizes the people, institutions and relationships that form China’s elite power …

Libraries and the mystery of Toynbee tiles

Toynbee tiles – If you’re in the mood for a real-life mystery that involves imagination, single-mindedness over spans of time, great ingenuity, a fair amount of what many might describe as wackiness and that remains, despite knowing who the person behind the tiles is, at its heart still an enigma, …

The Codes Project

  The Codes Project – website is “an anthology of the codes, laws and related documents that have created, or sought to create, particular urban forms.”  This project, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, covers codes from “around the world, and from all time periods.” The Directory section …

Shed of the Year

      Shed of the Year: boat-roofed creation sails to victory – annual competition in the UK got almost 2000 entrants this year.  See some of the others at Shed of the Year 2013 entrants. Why sheds?   From Shed of the year contest trumpets UK’s love of garden hideaways: Novelist …

Book-illustration-lovers delight

  BibliOdyssey – one of my favorite places to take a break; here’s the tag line:  Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart.  Each post features images based on a theme, or from a specific book or manuscript.  The images are wonderful and plentiful and unexpected.  Most sources are from early printed books or manuscripts …

New issue of ArchiAfrika

  ArchiAfrika Magazine #2 – this second issue covers a wide range of topics, from the cover story on musician Hugh Masakela to African architects at Milan Design Week (shown here) to recycling practices in 6 African cities to community-built compressed-earth block schools in the Dogon to informal housing in Accra …

Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America is launching on April 18-19 in Boston.  This huge and long-awaited project is a cooperative non-profit venture undertaken by libraries, museums and other institutions from across the country, aggregating access to digitized content and making it all easily searchable and accessible.  Their Elements page …

Earthen architecture, Star Wars, thermal mass, and troglodyte hotels

  Earthen Architecture: A Technique of the Past Helping Us Toward a Greener Future –  UNESCO and Building Green Futures are working together to build a women’s center in Palestine made out of earth, or mudbrick, an ancient tradition that’s excellent at conserving energy. … over one third of the world’s population lives …

A building too tall

  A Timeless View From the Cloisters Faces a Modern Intrusion – the view across the Hudson from the  Cloisters a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that makes you feel you’re in medieval Europe, is being threatened by a 143 foot tall headquarters building for LG Electronics that’s being …